The University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s master’s program in information quality recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and the only complaint from employer Black Oak Analytics Inc. is that it should produce even more “rock stars.”
Black Oak is a Little Rock company that provides a cloud-based software as a service called HiPER. HiPER sifts through online data to identify separate records that concern the same person, account or product.
CEO Rick McGraw said it goes beyond matching names and addresses, too, by pairing records with the same IP addresses, device IDs, product descriptions, cell phone numbers and more.
The firm does what it does with help from several graduates of the master’s program. Black Oak has even paid their tuition, McGraw said.
The program was established in 2006 with an enrollment of 25, and the university added a Ph.D. track in information quality in 2008. Last year, 72 were enrolled in the master’s program and 27 were enrolled in the Ph.D. program, according to Elizabeth Pierce, chair of the Department of Information Sciences in the Donaghey College of Engineering & Information Technology.
She also said, as of Spring 2016, 186 people had graduated from one or both tracks. Fifty-nine of those obtained a Ph.D.
McGraw said one of his employees, Daniel Pullen, should earn his Ph.D. in information quality in a few months.
Pullen said the program prepared him well to work for Black Oak because the firm focuses on quality. He said he was taught to discern what data is valuable based on factors like accuracy, timeliness, believability and more.
Pullen also said the information quality programs have adapted Deming’s 14 Points on Quality Management — the manufacturing process that helped Toyota gain widespread success — to data analysis.
Students are being taught the best methods being used by businesses to find existing research and to conduct original research.
McGraw said people like Pullen are valuable to employers because “there is a gap, a real need, for data scientists across the country” that have business, technical and creative acumen.
Creativity is needed because “there’s no blueprint. They’re not working toward, necessarily, a specific problem … they’re looking at the data and saying ‘Well, if I knew that then I could do this,” he said.
McGraw said various industries are using quality information — health care for risk mitigation and improving patient outcomes; financial services to make better credit decisions; and employers like Black Oak to hire better people.